G-325a Employment History Concern

[JulieandDanny 7]

Hello all,

I have quite a specific question that I couldn't quite answer by looking at others concerns for the G325a. Hopefully someone can shed some light on what I'm worried about.

In my last five years of employment history, I spent 75% of this time living abroad in Liverpool, UK on student and post-study work visas.

I worked in the UK for most of these years, and for two of those years I was registered and worked as self-employed in the UK.

I paid national insurance contributions and tax as income was reported in the UK, nothing was owed and often I got a refund, all good.

However, upon returning home to the USA, I discovered that I had received bad advice about my responsibility to report foreign income on my U.S. tax returns to the IRS. My mother had assured me that it was not necessary to report, and I had allowed her to file some tax returns on my behalf for me while I was living abroad. Boy do i regret this now!

Since then I have discovered that this is not precisely true.

With my standard deductions, I would still be below the reporting threshold for IRS income for most of the years mentioned- so I needn't have reported the income. Great!

However, as I had stock activity 1099s were filed.

To accompany those 1099s- my mother sometimes filed 1040s for me ... Not great!

So for at least one year in the last five she filed a 1040 which stated I had no income- when in fact I did. So that year's tax return is technically incorrect.

Also, I've learned since that my self-employed income for two of these years gave me a different kind of filing responsibility- and had a different reporting threshold- much lower- so I may have needed to report all of it and suspect I may have to pay back-taxes for those two years as well ...

Having now established myself back in my home country, I am taking control of my tax issues and I'm meeting with a tax advisor (today actually) to begin sorting this out!

My worry is this:

I want to submit our I29f for K1 packet as soon as possible (by the end of this month)...

Although I'm getting right on these back tax issues as well the corrections may not show up in IRS records right away or in time for the first checks on our forms that USCIS will do...

Should I be concerned that I'm listing all of this UK employment on my G325a... I definitely want to be 100% truthful about when/where I've worked.

Will flags be raised if my IRS returns reflect a report of 'no income' for a year where I've reported working in the UK on the form, or no record of the two years of reported self-employment in the UK.

Or, as some have hinted/stated on here, do the IRS not 'talk' to the USCIS at this first stage and they probably won't be looking at this kind of info... just making sure i'm not a 'bad guy' from bigger databases...

I can see that they look more into the petitioner (me) than the beneficiary-- but does anyone know if an issue as deep into my records as this has bearing at this point? I'm hoping that something like this wouldn't matter at this initial stage.

I was hoping that the tax record wouldn't matter till we get to I134s when I will by that time have record of this matter being on its way to resolved (besides we will be using a joint sponsor at that point).

Sorry for this being quite a complex question right out the gate- any help greatly appreciated.

[Zedayn 485]

You are thinking too hard on this. This is just a brief background of yourself, which includes your employment history. USCIS and the IRS are not going to be comparing notes, they just want a little background about you. Just list all of your employment for the last 5 years like it asks, and you will be fine. As far as your tax issues go, your tax information won't be needed until the interview stage at the embassy...after your I-129f is approved. It should give you plenty of time to take care of your taxes by then.

[JulieandDanny 7]

Thank you Zedayn. That is a reassuring answer.

I was thinking it wasn't probably a big deal... but that it wouldn't hurt to be ask.

So there's my first 10 point penalty for over-worrying!